Empire Builder 1: Breed, Populate, Conquer by Dante King (free e books to read online txt) 📕

That’s what it looked like. It was a creamy-colored round egg, around football-sized, lying in the bed next to him. The surface was discolored by reddish-brown streaks, three in a row, dotted around the circumference, almost resembling the kinds of scratches an animal’s claws might make.

Ben shook his head. Why was he pondering the pattern of the egg’s surface? There was a fucking egg on the hotel bed beside him! He reached over and poked the thing, the egg wobbling on its side. What the hell was going on?

“Benzhameen,” Melody’s accented voice lilted from behind him. “It…it worked.”

“What worked?” he asked, still staring at this weird egg-shaped object. If there was one thing you never expected to see after knocking boots with a beautiful woman, it was. . . whatever the hell this was.

Ben pushed his hands under him and lifted his body back against the headboard.

Melody stood to the left, leaning over the bed to study the surface of the egg. She was totally naked, as if it were no big deal at all.

All thoughts about the egg vanished as his attention was completely absorbed by a couple of other round objects, even closer to his vision.

He’d slept with some hot girls before, some sevens, even an eight every now and them. He’d even dated this girl Amy who was a hard nine. CS majors tended not to have the best of luck pulling the ladies, but as the top student in his class, he’d managed to land a high-paying internship at a good firm. And the promise of a fat paycheck in the very near future allowed him to splurge a bit on dates. Or, at least give a girl a better time than simply Fridays at Dunkin’ Donuts like the rest of his broke classmates.

So, he had some experience with girls he’d only dreamed of dating in high school.

But Melody blew all of them out of the water. The lithe muscles of her long legs drew his eyes up toward the full but firm curve of her mouth-watering ass, which had so perfectly filled his hands last night.

Her stomach was looking a little more rounded than he remembered from the previous evening, but the skin was taut, and he recalled the soft warmth of her body against his.

But it was her breasts that really drew his attention. He’d always been a boob man, much as he appreciated a nice round ass. This girl’s breasts were among the largest he’d ever seen, and definitely natural. They were firm and pert, even without a bra to hold them up. Just staring at her bold pink nipples brought the memory of how they’d tasted.

Melody turned to face him, and her cheeks flushed as she saw him staring. But if she was embarrassed, she made no move to cover herself. Foreign women could be much less inhibited than American women, and way more comfortable with nakedness.

And her face had that exotic allure that he’d always had a weakness for. Her cheeks were round, her lips full, her purple eyes piercing, framed by long eyelashes.

Wait. . . Purple eyes? Am I seeing things?

Her hair was purple too, he realized. He hadn’t noticed any of the details in the dark club the night before, or in the low light of the hotel bedroom, but he supposed she must have been wearing contacts, and hadn’t had time to take them out. Those eyes and the purple hair suited her.

But her hair was strange. He’d known girls who’d dyed their hair weird colors like red and blue and orange, and the dye jobs always seemed to have a fakeness to them—and you could usually see their natural color at the roots. But her hair was solid purple, from root to tip. As much as he wanted to believe the color was fake, it seemed so real.

Melody stared into his eyes curiously, her head cocked to the side. Ben ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair, trying to focus, to figure out what the hell was going on. Then she murmured his name once again.

“Benzhameen?”

“It worked, you said?” He could hear his own voice almost whispering in a daze. “What worked?”

Melody laughed, a lilting, sweet-sounding laugh, her purple hair shaking as it cascaded over her cheeks.

Melody pointed at the egg-shaped object on the bed beside him. “That worked, Benjamin. What else would I be talking about?”

She was talking about this egg thing as if it were the most normal happening in the world, like the typical result of what they’d gotten up to last night.

Her eyes stayed locked onto his, the purple irises almost eclipsed by her big, Disney-like pupils. This girl was a strange one—who wears colored contacts and then doesn’t take them out before going to bed? Maybe it was nothing, but he needed some answers.

“Alright, Melody—any chance you can tell me what the hell’s going on?” Ben’s tone was sharp, and Melody stiffened with wide-eyed attention as if she’d received a command from a general.

“I mean, I’ve got nothing against, uh, experimenting in the bedroom.” Ben swept his hand toward the pale egg beside him, the thing still radiating warmth. “But this doesn’t look like any toy I’ve ever seen before. What is it, a Japanese sex egg or something?”

Melody laughed again. “Benjamin, this is no toy. This is our child.” She seized his left hand in both of hers then stared lovingly at the egg beside him as if it were a newborn baby.

Ben tried to wrap his head around what she was saying. The egg was their child? She’d been acting weird ever since he’d met her last night, but this was downright bonkers.

“What are you saying?” Ben placed his hand on the surface of the egg.

As soon as his fingers touched the warm round shell, his stomach jumped. The room seemed to darken, and the image of something like a lynx prowling through the snow on unsteady legs appeared in